Posts by rh587

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Re: Reasonable Doubt

Your defence lawyer stands up, does his thing and references the act

At which point he is arrested under this act and the trial restarted with a new Jury.

I think this is where the lawyer asks the witness/defendant a question which does not necessarily adduce or imply interception activities, but which requires them to give an awkward answer - such as "I cannot answer that without committing an offence".

If the judge were a sensible type who was as cynical of this legislation as the rest of us (and they do exist - see the judge in the ABC trial who threw the whole case out because the security services were playing silly buggers), they might then require that the question be answered honestly and without perjury. The witness would then be faced with a quandry - commit perjury and be in contempt of court (by refusing to comply with the court's demand), or commit an offence under the IPA.

I would suggest that many courts would be unwilling to convict someone of an offence under the IPA when they were compelled to make that disclosure by order of the court in the first instance.

It would require a carefully worded approach and a sufficiently inclined judge to make it a court matter, but a smart barrister should be able to come up with something.

If you had a sympathetic MP they could also use parliamentary privilege to ask about the case in Parliament, and the lawyer might be able to then ask a witness about that public domain statement. I'm sure there are clever ways to "launder" the question - if the NSA can launder intelligence, barristers can launder questions!

I think the suggestion was perhaps that there will now always be a reasonable doubt by default regardless of the evidence actually presented because there is a possibility that the defendant may be prevented from actually defending themselves, or that the prosecution case has not been properly cross-examined.

Re: SMS isn't really two factor

Where's the second factor?

If you steal someone's device you're in. If you've got someone's phone (and have broken into it for access to SMS/e-mail), then it doesn't matter if they're using a TOTP auth app or SMS - if you own the device, you've got the crown jewels.

If we're extrapolating to that point, your only option is a dedicated hardware token which you keep separate from your phone or any device which you use to login or which might contain passwords (aside from when you're actually logging in, obviously).

I suspect there's probably a very good and sensible reason. The Royal Mint are good at this. If they need tallow in there, it's because they need it.

Much the same as there is a move to stop plant cultivators using peat-based compost. Everyone agrees it's bad, but no one has yet managed to produce a compost that has the right water-retention and binding qualities the industry requires without mixing some peat in.

2. If it's free, there is the question whether they log traffic - they can see your real IP and your destination. If they log that, then your PII is at risk. Worse yet if they're really unscrupulous and do DPI to skim for e-mail addresses or other PII to sell on. You're basically setting yourself up for a deliberate MITM to get around a greater evil.

Hopefully one brave ISP (!) will refuse to censor sites (they are hardly "qualified" and won't want the burden),

I'm not sure if this new legislation is intended to apply to all ISPs or if it will only be applied to the largest.

Andrews and Arnold famously don't filter. The big ISPs all have (optional) filtering in place anyway for parental control, and mandatory filtering infrastructure for court orders (like the Pirate Bay block and the Child-Porn blacklists they get from CEOP). Most of those are implemented via straight up DNS blocks, so I can see them just stuffing their new blacklist in there so they can say they've complied whilst the rest of us carry on using 8.8.8.8 or OpenDNS uninhibited.

I doubt many of the ISPs will want to go to the expense of pursuing a judicial review when they can just wing it with a gimped DNS "block" and not really inconvenience customers whilst also ticking the government's boxes.

I think they need to stop looking at extending half-arsed solutions like FTTC out to rural areas and instead focus on bringing improved services to urban and suburban areas. People out in the sticks make an awful lot of noise about not having the same access to services as those in towns and cities, especially when it comes to things like TV/radio reception and broadband, but it's their choice to live out there and they have to take the rough with the smooth, just like those of us in urban areas have to put up with eg. traffic.

The fact that you apparently have Virgin suggests you are in a decent sized (sub)urban area as NTL/Telewest/Virgin never bothered going anywhere even semi-rural.

However, this has left you short on knowledge of rural life.

1. You don't need to be rural to get terrible internet. My parents are on the edge of an FTTC-enabled village, but their line comes from the next village 3 miles away for reasons history does not recall. Fibre would make that moot, but lots of people in London or urban areas seem to have the same issue with EO lines and associated weirdness. A rationalisation of the network would instantly help.

2. Why do urban areas need FTTP? You can do VDSL or indeed G.Fast quite efficiently over short distances. Yes, they're inferior to P2P fibre, but digging up roads is expensive and do you really need more than 300Mb/s right now? As B4RN proved, soft-digging can be done relatively cheaply and efficiently compared with the usual £/km quoted for laying fibre (okay, they were uber cheap by being community based, but even for a profit-making business, soft-dig is cheaper than hard-dig).

3. DEFRA. Farmers don't get a "choice" about being rural. Nor do other, necessarily-rural industries. Meanwhile DEFRA are going paperless and demanding that farmers complete admin online, having downloaded 100Mb, 1000-page PDFs on compliance. This is one hand not talking to the other. If you're requiring rural areas to do their admin online, then it is necessary to ensure rural areas have adequate internet access. Since copper does not work over long distances, this leaves fibre. OR address your complaint to DEFRA and tell them to go back to Royal Mail based admin.

I'm feeling somewhat smug with my shiny new 50Mb Infinity (up in the West Midlands), as installed 8 days ago. Tis glorious. BT's new Smart Hub is quite decent as well - good 5GHz wifi and an IP6 address (at last!). Only major gripe is you don't seem to be able to change the DNS servers from BT's own to something sensible like 8.8.8.8 or OpenDNS.

However, my parents are still labouring on 2Mb ADSL despite being a mere third of a mile outside a village with FTTC/Infinity. For reasons history does not recall, they are the last property on a phone line that comes out from the next village over - some 3 miles away. They're not really rural or remote by any objective measure, but the barmy historic layout of BT's network cripples their connectivity.

With Fibre it would be a moot point, but since BT seem to have no interest in doing anything other than sweat the copper they could do with felling a couple of trees in opportune places and suggesting "how about you hook us up to that pole over there and connect us to the nearest village?".

The report notes that wireless networking isn't a big enough market to get its own line item in Apple's accounts

Which is strange when you consider how keen they are to strip wired I/O out of all their products including the "pro" ranges.

Sarcasm aside, the Airport Extreme is one thing, but this move presumably knocks the Time Capsule on the head, along with the Airport Express which played music. I wonder if we'll see a replacement Sonos-type streaming box coming out, as they're leaving the Apple TV hanging on it's own in terms of home-media.

Or maybe AppleTV is going to get axed as well and they've just decided that the likes of Sonos, Amazon FireTV, etc are doing it better than them and they're getting out of the network-media-player game altogether?

Agreed. I'm all for a vigorous opinion piece that pulls no punches (Mr Pott does a decent job there), but such a piece needs to be open and honest. Not only should it embrace it's bias, but it needs to walk the walk as effectively as it talks the talk - "this is shit because x".

Gareth has just earnestly shitposted at least a half-dozen fake "facts" through that diatribe to support his claims regarding Musk's state-of-mind. If you want to roast someone, this is not how you do it.

Re: No video transmitted

That seems quite likely to me given just how much bandwidth would be required if every street light had a live video feed.

I would also imagine cameras are pointing downwards to detect cars passing on the section of road they illuminate, average speed being calculated from the length time it takes for a vehicle to pass underneath; it doesn't have to be that accurate.

My thinking too.

You can do machine-vision with a Raspberry Pi (to a point). It would not be difficult for a small embedded board to count cars and ping back numbers, obviating the need for the high-speed networking necessary to carry multiple video feeds.

Um, no. A modern 4.5 inch gun or even the 5 inch guns on American ships definitely does not outgun or outrange a WW2 battleship.

The guns on HMS Dreadnought topped out at 22km. And that's assuming they hit what they were aiming at.

A modern MkVIII will go from 28km.

Now, the 15-inchers on the Bismarck would do it (~36km), as would the RN's 14in MkVII (~33km), but the MkVIIs would only fire 2rounds per minute, and the Bismarck's 15-inch guns could do 2.5rpm.

The MkVIII will manage 25rpm.

So what we're looking at is low-rate-of-fire with old targeting tech and all defence provided by armour, compared with high-rate-of-fire, state-of-the-art radar and sophisticated defensive armaments to shoot down incoming shells. Funnily enough, this is why ships carry fewer guns these days!

In an extreme-range engagement I'd probably take my chances on the ship which can lay down 10 times more ordnance in the first couple of minutes and use it's defensive weaponry to eliminate the incoming, subsonic shells.

Re: Is it...

As I see it, the main problem with email (apart from spam luvverly spam) is not whether you can encrypt it (easy if a plain text message or attachment is properly encoded (eg one time pad) but that it's easily traceable and archivable, together with sender and receiver info.

When the authorities get a copy of the email (easy) it's game over. You're marked - hand over the codes or you're guilty.

The thing is, that in some circumstances this is desirable.

For instance, Germany has taken strides to allow digital document/e-mail signing so that such documents can have the legal power of a signed document, so one can digitally sign a contract instead of having to FedEx boxes of dead tree around the place. DeMail offered message integrity, but not confidentiality

In such cases, traceability and accountability is a necessary attribute. Balancing that paper-trail against the ability to encrypt/protect both the content of such data and the associated meta-data is quite a difficult thing to do. But there are plenty of business use-cases where a Signal-like IM service simply does not replace e-mail.

Re: Is it...

Even possible to completely encrypt email?

At some point an SMTP handshake has to occur those are largely plain text or at best trivially encrypted

This is true. ProtonMail seem to be advocating that Proton-to-Proton mail remains on their servers, so neither the content or handshake ever leaves their iron, and then of course it's all encrypted at rest.

E-mail from an end-point outside the ProtonMail ecosystem can be encrypted using PGP - ProtonMail use PGP as the basis of their content-encryption, so you can download/publish your Public Key and people can encrypt mail to you which ProtonMail will then unlock. For instance, you can upload your public key to facebook's PGP e-mail service and all FB notifications can be encrypted (which seems silly but for those that use it, facebook notifications can contain significant personal information and of course using "Signup/Login with Facebook" and OAuth-type services means your facebook account can be as valuable from a cross-service perspective as your e-mail account).

As far as I can tell though they do not allow outbound PGP encryption, which would be the next key step in the service maturing - allowing you to encrypt and sign outbound messages to non-Proton users.

As you say, a system like Signal with Peer-2-Peer encryption and no central content servers is ultimately superior.

Re: Just a short hop.

Another poor dear phoned up and accused me of stealing her phone number (two digits swapped), at least that explained all the home help and social services calls I had been getting..

Reminds me of the call I had at work shortly after we moved in and had a change of number.

Me: Good morning, tiny-corp

Caller: Hello? Is Mabel there?

Me: I'm afraid not, this is a business number you've come through to.

Caller: Are you sure?

Um. Yes. Quite.

We then got a call from the Police telling us to stop cold-calling the elderly with aggressive sales tactics. as we were a small B2B that provided a specialist service to large (Fortune 500) type companies. We suggested they speak to BT about what bunch of pirates was assigned this number previously...

Re: Plenty of air forces out there...

In Europe, maybe. Not in the US. You should see the Fleet Week air show in San Francisco sometime. The close formation action takes place over the bay, but I've also seen a fighter (F16?) come in over the crowd low and loud

Singles maybe (though it's still frowned upon).

It's anything involving head-on maneuvres (like the Red's Synchro Pair) that must be done parallel to the crowd line so in principle the momentum of debris carries it parallel to the crowd, not into it.

It's not so much distance between aircraft and spectators as the direction and orientation of the display with respect to the spectators.

Re: Plenty of air forces out there...

Probably why they have a 10% death rate. There's putting on a good show and then there's ooh-rah willy waving. The Blue Angels cross over to the latter a little too often at the cost of lives (yes, the Reds have had a bad patch recently, but before then they hadn't had a major accident or fatality for years and years).

Re: Alpha Jet

Alpha Jet - It's the nearest thing to the Hawk in performance terms

From the options on the survey maybe. It's also an entirely new aircraft to the Air Force.

Boringly, but realistically though it'll be the Hawk 128 (or Hawk T2 as the RAF call it). Arrows pilots will have trained on it, be familiar with it, the RAF already has them (along with logistics/service/parts). It's even more Hawk-like than the Alpha Jet (being a Hawk and all...).

Re: Morally binding what though?

What right have they got to subvert parliament about that decision?

As a remain-voter, I do feel obliged to play devil's advocate. The government have not claimed the right to make up the terms. They can't. If we leave the EU, we will need to repeal the European Communities Act, and an Act of Parliament can only be repealed *drum roll* by another act of parliament!

This entire case has absolutely no bearing on the manner of our leaving. It is solely about whether the government can invoke Article 50 without parliamentary approval, which is an entirely different thing to setting the terms (which would require some sort of ratifying statute legislation - including the repeal of the EC Act - which Parliament would then get to see).

Re: @AC The United States doesn't have enough power to influence Ecuador...

I was disgusted to read that she knew a rapist she defended was guilty

You're obviously not aware of what the job of a defence counsel is.

Their job is to nit pick over every bit of the prosecution case and ensure the client gets a fair trial. They ensure that there is no way a guilty person can get the conviction overturned or deemed unsafe because the prosecution was allowed to half-arse it first time around.

Their job is not to "get people off", but to ensure any conviction is sound and prevent miscarriages of justice where the Police have got the wrong person.

Re: Targeting

To criminals maybe, not nation states.

I think you'll find that having control of the personal e-mail of an employee at AWE or BAE systems, or knowing they are on Ashley Madison could be of enormous use if you were hoping to leverage someone to gain access to information on more secure or air-gapped systems.

This is the reason Enhanced Vetting asks some extremely intimate questions about one's sexual preferences and fetishes (amongst other things). Reduces the risk of blackmail because HR already know your dirty secrets an you won't have any problem walking in and saying "I've been approached by someone threatening to release x about me."

Re: anti-Microsoft rant more like...

Apple announcement: The iPiss will go on sale tomorrow!

Apple drones: Must queue at nearest Apple store to buy one at 12:01 AM

I will report forthwith for reconditioning - mine seems to have worn off. I met news of the iPhone 7 with a "Meh, too big, just like the 6". Happy 5S user here. Steve would be disappointed in me (or possibly in Apple, who knows these days).

Re: minimum weight

G applies to the entire mass of the seat. Under +G the seat and pilot are "heavier" for the charge to get moving.

If one ejected under negative g, then the pilot and seat would be "lighter", meaning even the sturdiest pilot would come in "underweight".

One presumes the seat already has a g-meter to deal with such potential variation in ejection conditions, and the weight switch would inform it whether the pilot is lighter than the cut-off at a given g-rating.

Re: Going nowhere

I'm having a hard time imagining that liability isn't strictly determined by the contract, especially in a business as inherently expensive and risky as launching satellites

I read elsewhere that in these sorts of complex contracts (especially where you have multiple underwriters and the like), it's actually part of the contract to lodge a lawsuit early to head off other lawsuits down the road - it's basically a de rigeur part of the claim process. You've clearly got the claim down and there can't be quibbling down the road because a court has seen the initial claim.

IANAL, and I have not seen SpaceCom's insurance policy, but it seemed this was a standard move - of course a bit of public posturing is never a bad thing, but I wouldn't expect to pay for a flight if the operator set it on fire before launch - either get me a new rocket or give me a refund.

Re: Unwise

I say "unwise" with the trepidation of knowing that some of the smartest people on Earth will have considered this decision: who am I to gainsay them?

Not quite. The HR Department that manages the payroll for some of the smartest people on Earth (and handles PII regarding their job role, security clearance, home address, etc!) has considered this decision... that's a very different thing!

You may keep your physics at home; but would you really want to provide enemies with the opportunity to learn about who works at AWE, and where they live, or what their NI numbers are (for example)? Beware of non-obvious routes into your citadel of secrets.

Exactly this. Putting the PII of workers is as risky as putting classified data in the cloud - because the workers can get their arms twisted, be blackmailed, coerced, etc into giving you that data (and the really secret stuff they didn't put in the cloud).

If you're not happy to put your crown jewels in the cloud, then you probably shouldn't put the PII of people who have access to your crown jewels in the cloud either!

Re: So, what's it for?

They'll spend a lot of time hosting on-board guests from Customs and DEFRA, assisting them in Customs/anti-smuggling operations and fisheries protection.

Additionally, having a few smaller vessels knocking around is good for training.

After the last time they grounded a frigate it was suggested that there was a bit of a training gap - once upon a time we had lots of small coastal vessels, and young officers would get the opportunity to cut their teeth commanding a small vessel, before moving up to this sort of offshore vessel before they got a sniff at getting on the bridge of a larger frigate, destroyer or carrier.

More recently we've moved to having fewer coastal vessels, whose operations are directed by aircraft and satellite intelligence, which operationally is all around more efficient - an aircraft can cover a much larger area than a ship and since most of it is empty, you're better off doing aerial surveillance and just having one ship which is sent where it needs to be (instead of lots of ships covering the area).

The downside is fewer small ships gives you fewer places to post up-and-coming young officers for their first experience of command.

Re: You have a choice where you live

I am not interested in paying in the form of tax for people who live in a area with poor broadband speeds

Fair enough, you'd best address your complaints to DEFRA - who are the ones increasingly making their extensive collection of paperwork only available online and insisting that various annual returns be done online.

So, either they need to go back to paper-only, or they can fund the roll-out of infrastructure... from your taxes!

Re: Why ?

I personally think about 30Mb/s, so around 4MB/s, is easily enough for almost everybody right now, and perhaps we should be looking at getting more people onto 30Mb/s rather than upgrading my broadband speed in Birmingham *again* (with concomitant price increases, naturally) to something like 100Mb/s (I just tested and get 76Mb/s on WiFi, never mind wired).

See, I don't entirely disagree. 30Mb/s is enough for most people right now.

The problem is that it ignores the reality of the network.

The places who struggle to get infinity now are people like my parents - who actually aren't really rural at all, but their phone line doesn't come from the nearest village - it comes from the wrong direction, meaning they're a couple of miles from the cabinet - never mind the exchange!

In principle it's very reasonable to suggest that we should get basic 30Mb Infinity rolled out to everyone before we worry about punting 300Mb/s G.Fast to the cities, but the problem is that even if you upgraded their cabinet to infinity, the "final mile"(s) would be the choke point - they're not going to sync more than 1.5Mb/s on a good day over the dodgy copper, regardless of how much fibrey goodness you stuff into the cabinet, and BT simply aren't interested in FTTH. Hell - they're still installing copper phone lines into new-build estates. I get that upgrading and overbuilding their existing network is expensive, but if you're fitting a brand new line into a new-build house, why the fuck would you install copper instead of FTTH as default? It's utter madness.

The only real solution is to bite the bullet and start rolling FTTH, and if you're doing that, you might as well run it as gigabit - there's no technical reason you wouldn't. Of course business considerations demand that you choke it down to 10Mb/s and charge through the nose for the "upgrade" to 70Mb/s on a line which could trivially link at gigabit, but that's by the by. The only sane upgrade that leaves you overhead for tomorrow's demands is fibre - and you're going to run fibre at gigabit as a baseline.

So my main concern is not the actual bit-rate you're getting and the growing gulg between town and country - towns will always get faster speeds just due to density, but the fact that the technology BT is chasing (squeezing every last bit out of copper) simply does not apply to much of the rural community, and is ultimately running into diminishing returns, whereas fibre can simply run at gigabit today (it could even run at 10G if you wanted to pay for it) and doesn't need touching for another couple of decades, by which time smart WDM optics will be capable of shovelling ever increasing quantities of data down each strand.

Yeah, gigabit is waaay more than you need, but the cost differential between 100Mb/s and gigabit optics is negligible and the extra upload speed actually is useful for things like overnight backups and file transfers (about the only time you'll ever actually flat-line a network connection, even if you'd struggle to hit 100Mb/s with multiple HD streams and a few OS/App updates downloading).

Pah! I worked with someone who went to the wrong African COUNTRY on a support call.

Pah. Just him, not anyone else?

I know someone who sent a shipment of 300 new cars to Sweden instead of a Swindon dealer (large dealer, it was the order for the new plates, huge turnover in a couple of weeks).

I wish I were joking... it shouldn't even be possible, but he managed to bork the paperwork sufficiently that the error wasn't uncovered until his Swedish importer called asking why the port was pestering him over 300 cars on their quayside with his name on that he hadn't ordered...

Re: Sounds like nonsense to me

Since when does a 500g cause aircraft to drop out of the sky? And remember that the pilots are also equiped with eyes. And how was one aircraft, drone or otherwise, blocking the entire area?

It could easily down a helicopter with a rotor strike.

Fixed wing is less likely to down it (unless it went through an engine whilst the aircraft was fully laden. Air tankers are massively overpowered once empty but underpowered when full), but even if you only caused minor fuselage/wing damage and didn't ruin an engine, that's going to be enough to render the aircraft U/S once it lands, removing it from operations for 24+ hours when it should be flying.

Also, the firefighting community is particularly tetchy about air tankers because they've had a few too many of these types of incidents in the past 20 years or so.

Re: He is the 506th person to die in a police shooting this year in the Land of the FreeTM

Policing can be nasty and dangerous work. They tend not to interact much with the top 99% of orderly and civilized people, and the bottom 1% can be random, unpredictable and dangerous.

It can be indeed.

In this case you have someone declaring ahead of time that they have a Concealed Carry Firearm in the vehicle. You hopefully knew this already because you'd run the license plates through your data terminal before you even got out your cruiser.

The combination of knowing this person has a CCW license, and them freely declaring it to you tells you they are a fundamentally law-abiding individual, and moreover, if they had any intention of shooting you, they'd have likely already done it.

We have now had multiple cases where US LE Officers have requested a driver produce their license and have opened fire as they reached for it - in one case shooting an individual in the back as they reached into their car (Tony Martin got murder for that. Someone with their back to you is not a threat. They can become a threat very quickly, but if you're shooting someone in the back then you need an exceptional reason why).

This smacks of Scenario Fulfilment, which is a symptom of poor quality training. The officer has identified that they might be reaching for a firearm and in every such training simulation has ended up having to discharge their firearm, thus they get tunnel vision and start playing out their training even when reality diverges from training.

All that said, I do find it odd that in a country with such an apparent problem with firearm violence that most Police Uniforms do not include some level of body armour as standard. In the UK, the Met Vest provides protection from stabbing and limited ballistic protection even for non-Firearm Officers. Perhaps officers would be a little less trigger-happy if they were a little less exposed (either with a uniform met-vest or an under-shirt covert vest).

Re: Uninitialised memory referenced during execution

For fucks sake - how can these police officers have been so badly trained.

Well therein lies the issue. What is a "Police Officer"? Unlike the UK where we have one main layer of law enforcement, the term has no useful meaning in the US. It could be FBI, State Troopers, County Sheriffs or local town/city PD.

Naturally, the smaller PDs generally do much less training than your average FBI agent. Due to limited resource/funding, the (re)training programme of a small town PD is likely much less robust than say Chicago PD - for instance, they might spend lots of time on the range learning to shoot accurately and proficiently, but at the cost of role-play and realistic simulation.

I spent a couple of hours watching Thames Valley Armed Response doing drills - they only (blank) fired once in all that period. Most of the scenarios resulted in a de-escalation and non-fatal arrest.

I suspect some of the less robust US training programmes inadvertently reinforce "Scenario Fulfilment" where officers start down a path of force (draw side-arm, prepare for use of force) and all their training has resulted in them finally using force, so they're mentally set on a path which doesn't end with de-escalation and get subconsciously tunnel-visioned towards firing their weapon.

Re: 10 Gb/s is all well and good

But what kind of capacity does their network have out to the wider internet?

Much like corporate networks, I doubt that this system would have the backbone connection to actually support more than a small handful of users going full-tilt at 10 Gb/s. Hell, I doubt that they could support more than a dozen users at 1 Gb...

True, but it depends on who they're peering with and whether they collaborate and get hold of a Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, etc. If they're able to peer with a few big CDNs and get a few appliances/servers internal to their network, their actual (paid for) Tier 1 network connectivity can be kept quite manageable.

B4RN in the UK runs a 20Gbps backbone out of each 192-user node (all on 1Gbps connections), so that's a node contention rate of ~10-1. Overnight, you might actually get 1Gbps, but even if everyone is hammering away you should still get 100Mbps, which is 30% faster than the theoretical maximum of 76Mbps for BT's Infinity 2 product (and I'd bet BT's infinity cabinets are running on a damn sight higher contention than 10-1).

B4RN's fibre link to the IXP runs DWDM, so from memory, they can theoretically scale it to ~36 channels of 10Gbps - which would give ~360Gbps, which maintains the 10-1 contention for the ~3000 properties they designed the network for.

However, despite that 10-1 contention rate in the network, as far as the outbound connectivity goes though, they only have a single 10Gbps connection to a Tier 1 provider. Manchester has a good datacentre community so they've got excellent settlement-free peering opportunities to the BBC (iPlayer), Amazon, Netflix, Apple, MS, etc, etc which is where the other few hundred Gbps goes.

By the looks of it, Detroit-IX has Akamai and Google, which is a damn good start (although curiously Rocket Fibre aren't on their peering list?).

I'd like to know how they can provide cost-effective competitive broadband AND that level of service AND still turn a profit.

Probably something to do with containing their initial effort in a 3-square mile area, meaning they're never more than a couple of minutes from an issue with no distant customers and don't need any particularly esoteric optics.

Throw in the usage of cheaper enterprise-grade hardware rather than telco grade (I don't know if they do, but it would make sense - worked for B4RN) and Bob's your mother's brother.

Whilst telcos like BT are burning millions on (genuinely clever research) trying to work out how to squeeze 300Mbps down 20 metres of phone wire, the fibre startups are just cutting to the chase, accepting the CAPEX of laying fibre onto the premises which can then be upgraded from 1Gb to 10Gb, to more (with xWDM) simply through a change in existing, off-the-shelf optics, giving them a negligible $/Mb cost.

Re: "supersonic fighter"

The Harriers weren't supersonic.

Technically they weren't fighters either. Our fighters have indeed been supersonic for decades.

The Harrier was an air interdiction/close air support strike platform, hence it's GR5/7/9 designations (Ground attack and Reconnaissance). As it happens it performed quite well air-to-air against Argentine fighters as well, being highly manoeuvrable with it's vectored thrust and strongly anhedral wings. But that wasn't it's design role.

Re: Reboot Europe?

If you must reboot Europe, do it when Europe can cope - right now it cannot.

So, in like 30 years? Greece is in a positive-feedback loop of debt. Simply punting them €100Bn every 18 months isn't going to fix it (obviously we're not paying that directly - it's mostly Germany and France - but it's dragging the entire region down with it). The EU needs a shake-up and the leadership appears to be totally disinterested in doing so. Certain countries need throwing out to their own currency until their economies are managed to a state where they can coexist under the same fiscal policy as countries like Germany and France.

The EU is stagnant, lurching from one bail-out to another. The growth markets are BRIC (maybe not so much Russia at the moment).

The EU has had years and is sitting on it's hands because they're all too embarrassed to admit they grew too big too fast and need to prune their ambitions for the good of everybody. I'd say this is the perfect time to walk away before it falls over on it's own.

We can leave a note saying "See? I warned you - and here's the email trail - that you needed redundancy and a proper backup solution. I tried. I did. But you just weren't interested. You didn't want the redundant PSU or the second array to failover to. Now you get to start again."

I'm not even entirely convinced by my own argument. But sometimes people won't be helped and you walk away before you get sucked into an even bigger mess. This might be one of those times. The EU needs to boot Greece and a couple of others out of the Euro. Not the common market or EU, but out the Euro. The fact they have not been willing to do so tells you that they are bull-headed and unwilling to accept the truth in front of them. Which means we should leave them to it and watch from a safe distance.

Re: Dear Andrew

and because virtually everyone except Mrs Thatcher's second favourite economist says that there would be one,

Yeah, but all those people - the IMF, ECB, etc all failed to see the 2008 Crash coming, failed to properly regulate the securities market, and the ECB failed to properly vet and regulate the nations being admitted to the Eurozone, with the result they let basket cases like Greece come and play in a common currency with Germany, with a result that was obvious to anyone who knows their Cold War history and the events leading to the financial split of west and east Germany when maintaining a common Reichsmark became untenable.

One of the most odious lies. Syria and Iraq you mention. Closer to home, the EU did little good in Northern Ireland, Kosovo or Bosnia. I guess the Srebrenica Massacre didn't happen?

Of course the EU didn't exist 70 years ago. Or even 25 years ago. Attributing "70 years of peace" to the EU is ludicrous. Certain of their constituent bodies such as the WEU (who have merged into the EU) have contributed to a relatively stable Western Europe, but no more.

Re: So where is the post to balance this out?

Margallo (Spanish foreign minister) let slip something last week... he's sure that in the end there'd be a bilateral trade agreement between EU countries and the UK without any tariffs.

Course they will. Tourism is responsible for 10.5% of Spain's GDP and 12% of employment, and 25% of visitors are British.

If the EU did anything stupid to stop the millions of sleazyjet vacationers piling in, Spain's GDP would literally tumble 2.5% overnight, and GDP is going to have enough on it's plate without having to finance an ECB bailout of Spain.

Re: So where is the post to balance this out?

But don't put it past the EU to get all sinffy about a leave vote and decide those agreements are null and void. What then eh?

Well BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen Group will all start laying off German workers for one - 20% of cars made in Germany are sold into the UK.

Yes, we rely on European markets. 50% of our exports go to the EU, compared with 15% of Continental Europe's exports coming to us. But although we arguably have more to lose, the pain for the EU if they decided to be punitive would be immense.

Let's not be alarmist here - if we leave, we will take two years to do it and there will be a raft of agreements in place. And they won't be terrible. I note with interest that although many people have bemoaned "the Norway solution" as encumbering us with EU laws which we have no power over, it can't be that awful - Norway is a stable economy which would easily qualify for entry to both EU and Eurozone, but they choose not to. Interesting.

I'm still on the fence. Andrew's notes about Africa and the EU's negative impact on developing nations are well-expressed points that I've not seen raised by anyone in the last few months and are tugging me that way. A 100million person EEA could be hold good clout as a trade movement minus the politics.